hi,
i’m a newbie. i’m trying to activate the cloth modifier before the zero frame.
Practically I have this character that has clothes on, but everytime the animation starts the clothes vertexes fall from zero position, is there a way to make them start without making them fall from zero position… ??
Not that i know of, i tried doing this with a smoke sim to no avail. In stead i think you may have to bake it until it reaches a look you like and then stop it and render that frame. If anyone does have a way of doing this please help cos i need it too!
I always plan a few frames ahead for the cloth sim. Probably the simplest solution if you have an animation already created is to go into the dope sheet and simply grab the entire animation and move it ahead 100 frames. I always make sure that the cloth is set up to fall on a T pose and then I move the character slowly to a set pose from there. That would be a pose that is the same as the start frame. Because the cloth is dynamic it is moving with the force of these motions. So you have to give time for it to settle. So there is two pause points. Cloth falling to T Pose and then Cloth moving from T Pose to first position and pause there another 30 frames or so and then start the animation. You can do all of this in the dope sheet after the animation is complete.
This image is from a tutorial I did for 3D Artist Magazine issue #28.
The left of the image is the T Pose - well not exactly a T pose. But it is the rest pose of the animation. The cloth settles here first. The right of the image shows the set pose, for lack of a better term. It is from here that the actual keframed animation then takes place. Once you complete this you can then bake the cloth sim. And then just render from that point.
Maybe I can post up the animation this was taken from so you can see it in action.